


winter's end

by skyisnothingtobelieve



Category: IZONE (Band)
Genre: 2kim, Annyeongz, Hotaru - Freeform, Light Angst, kwangbi, retro vibes high school au, yenyul
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-25 07:36:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17720897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyisnothingtobelieve/pseuds/skyisnothingtobelieve
Summary: Que será, seráWhatever will be, will beThe future's not ours to seeQue será, seráWhat will be, will be.roughly inspired by the reply series.





	1. i. fever (wonyoung)

Whenever it rains, the hollows of my knees ache. The soreness is psychosomatic, I know, but it makes me feel like throwing up all the same. Hyewon hates it, the year’s first rainfall. That asshole up there is taking a piss on us again, she says. Chaeyeon thinks it’s pretty, despite everything. That each stray drop looks like a miniature glass ball, a brittle wishbone in a hurry to break itself apart. Yujin never remarks on the rain. Except, “I forgot my umbrella.” Or “ah, it’s cold.”

Yujin forgets her umbrella for the third time this week. Her mother calls from downstairs and asks Hyewon and me to pick her up from the study hall. Yujin had lined up at five in the morning for a spot but she ended up spending nine of her thirteen precious hours at the study hall sleeping on the floor, even though the plaques over the aisle desks explicitly forbade it.

That’s how we find her when we arrive. “She’s _dead_ dead,” Hyewon says before nudging her side with her dripping-wet shoe. Her cheek is pressed against the painted plastic tiles, as if she’s listening to the water pass beneath the earth, disappearing between the cracks where the sea trenches run deep and all the things of the ocean grow in the seams of these wrinkles, a miserable neighborhood of faceless civilians living inside the lines of their own palms.

Yujin awakes to the filthy soles of Hyewon’s uniform flats and the soft lull of disquietude that dusts the edges of a Saturday evening. Brushes away Hyewon’s foot with a skinny sleeve and stares right at me, through me, as if I were the dew-covered window on the opposite wall.

Stays like that, for the briefest of moments, looking beyond the city and rain, and the world.

 

“Cold. It’s cold,” Yujin undoes her scarf, wraps it tighter. There’s snow powdered all over her hair like icing on a cake, sparkling whenever we pass beneath a streetlamp.

“We should head back,” I say. “Eunbi will worry.”

“Is that so?” Yujin says, in that infuriating Daejeon accent and everything.

“Is that so?” I try. It doesn’t sound right in my mouth, pushing the second syllables of my words downward, amateur marionette, this awful plagiarism of the heart. I haven’t realized how cruelly different the dialect is until now, the strong Chungcheong inflections that cross the prettiest of sobriquets. I laugh to hide the awkwardness in my tone, hoping Yujin doesn’t catch it, the way it doesn’t belong between my teeth, makes a fool of my tongue, takes someone else’s epithets and pretends they’re its own.

Yujin quickens her place. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No,” I laugh. “I’m not.”

“What do you want?”

I let my fingers fumble in my pockets for a second. “A light,” I say. “Have one?”

“You smoke?”

“I guess I do now.” I pull on the lid a little too hard and it tears. “This isn’t mine, though, Hyewon asked me to hold onto it for her.”

“Oh.” She declines the cigarette I offer. “You sure you can—"

“She won’t notice.”

 

A long, golden snake of a garland chokes the too-thin limbs of our Christmas tree. The star on top looks like it’s about to fall. There are a few cheap ornaments Hyewon got from the supermarket, but we’d all forgotten about lights so at night the tree sits in the darkest corner of the rooftop, an eyesore of a silhouette.

“When I was little I wished it would snow every day,” Yujin says.

“And now?” I ask.

“Not anymore,” she admits. “Especially when it gets into my shoes.”

 

On Christmas Eve we have grilled beef, spicy ramyeon soup and instant dumplings, the extent of what Eunbi’s parents can afford. Mr. and Mrs. Kwon had insisted on treating us and went five nights eating only porridge and cabbage kimchi for dinner to save up for it. Yujin’s parents, as always, offer their place first, but this year Eunbi is dead set on having us over. “I just want to show off a bit,” she’d laughed softly, “that I’m not embarrassed of living in a half-basement anymore.”

It snows so much we can’t open the front door, so we stay for the night. The snow outside stretches all the way to the gate on one side and Hyewon’s house on the other. Hyewon argues with Yujin over the blanket until they fall asleep, their heads pillowed against each of Eunbi’s shoulders.

Outside, the snow continues to fall, burying us in our one-night tomb. In the hollows of my knees, something aches.

 

Once I dreamed of winter ending, the birds preparing for their homeward flight like they’re ready to return from a futile sabbatical. I could hear the ice breaking, the frost on the window disappearing faster than anything I’ve ever known.

“They’ll bloom soon,” Yujin said the next day, breathing over Eunbi’s cracked pots. There were already bulbs growing, little green shoots with shivering petals. “Halfway to spring.”

“Like the end of a fever,” I said.

Yujin understood.


	2. ii. harbor (hitomi)

It was his seventeenth birthday. The face-shaped cake left tears of candle wax on the fruit and we each had a piece. Even though it was his birthday, he had the least. _I don’t like frosting. Or cake for that matter._ So I took an extra helping, a slice of life with a no-good taste. After cake we counted down to the exact time he was born—seven twenty-three in the evening. He was an upside-down baby, as Mitsu called it, the kind that entered the world head first. I was a breech baby, too. Our mother’s belly was cut open twice but you could only really see one mark, a neat line that sagged inward from both above and below, severed flesh that didn’t seem to want to come together again.

The Seouldae noona that lived a floor above left her television on, which played Lee Seunghwan, Kim Gunmo, Seo Taiji. Mitsu-nii seemed more pleased than usual, humming along to Hayeoga even though he claimed that he didn’t care much for music. The flash blindness of fading daylight spread like overflowing water, catching dust in miniature tornadoes and eluding my fingers when I swung them through the air. _Nii-san, do you remember the okonomiyaki made by Koharu’s grandmother? We ate it all the time by the harbor, after school._ I missed the okonomiyaki, and the harbor. But not the people. Mitsu didn’t say anything. He just laughed. I wasn’t sure what to make of that so I laughed too. He laughed louder but I laughed longer. It was how I always wished to remember him—shivering slightly from the cold, hand covering mouth, body turning away.


End file.
